The Walking Dead: The Final Season Launch Trailer Is Emotional And Intense

Telltale Games is gearing up to round out The Walking Dead interactive narrative adventure series that started way back in 2012. Six years ago Telltale's take on Robert Kirkman's post-apocalyptic zombie tale garnered massive critical acclaim and huge success. It was decided to finally wrap up the series with one big finale centered around Clementine's tale with The Walking Dead: The Final Season. The first episode for the final season will debut next week, on August 14th, and Telltale released the launch trailer, which is intense and emotional, as it covers Clementine and AJ's fight for survival in the zombie-infested world.

The two and a half minute trailer starts with a recap of the end of the first season of The Walking Dead, where Lee Everett tells Clementine that it's okay. We see Clementine with the gun pointed at Lee's head after he was bitten and lost his arm in a zombie attack. We then cut to the present day with Clementine and AJ, where they appear at the Erickson Boarding School of Troubled Youth. The school is supposed to be a safe haven for kids, but the trailer reveals that someone has sabotaged it and walkers begin to attack.

The trailer for the first episode attempts to hit gamers right in the feels. There are a couple of noteworthy takeaways from the trailer that seem to hint at some of the adversity that Clementine and AJ encounter. For instance, we see that Clementine has her head bandaged after some sort of ravenous encounter with the walkers. We're not sure exactly what happened but it left her bleeding and hurt. AJ didn't seem to escape from harm's way either; in one of the clips, AJ's face is burned and scarred.

Obviously, something takes place between the opening loot run when the duo investigates the not-so-abandoned house, and the journey to the survivor's hideout for kids. Whatever happens to them appears to be choice-driven, though. We see that in some sequences AJ and Clementine are fine, but, in others, they're hurt.

It appears Telltale is definitely keeping in line with the previous outings, where choices throughout The Walking Dead: The Final Season will carryover and have long-lasting effects on the characters. We saw similar outcomes in Batman: The Enemy Within, with decisions in one episode being able to cause drastic outcomes on the story going forward, including resulting in some characters dying completely, or getting maimed.

This was in response to some gamers complaining that Telltale games had become stale, and that the choices no longer mattered. For the last few seasons, especially in games like Batman and Guardians of the Galaxy: The Telltale Series, we did see the choices from players altering the story in drastic ways.

We'll see if Telltale maintains that pace now that the company is headed in a new direction and looking to recapture the imagination and intensity during the first season of The Walking Dead. If you haven't played any of the games in the series but you want to build your own story based on certain choices, you can do so right now ahead of the release of The Final Season by using the Telltale Story Builder over on the Telltale website. Once you're all done with that, you can import your saved game into The Walking Dead: The Final Season when it becomes available on August 14th for Xbox One, PS4, PC, mobile devices and the Nintendo Switch.